Listening to the other’s point of view starts during pre-selling. Don’t switch off when you’re through talking, Listen. Understand. If you don’t understand, ask questions until you do. Then you can do a better selling job because you know more than you did when you started.

Listening is one of the best times to pick up sales points and disagreement between otherwise agreeable allies. Listen to the words and to the tone. You will be able to tell who is leading whom. You can’t learn without listening, and the more you know, the better your chance of obtaining your goal.

Don’t let your mind wander or focus on objections, and don’t spend your pre-selling time trying to develop responses instead of concentrating on what has been said.

Listen, listen, listen. There is no substitute for listening, especially during the pre-sell period

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Pricing decisions draw on many areas of marketing expertise. It requires a comprehensive understanding of the forces that shape the market, including competitive interactions, technology and consumer psychology. Sometimes these forces interact and are likely to put downward pressure on prices, such as substitutes, technological advances, price-driven competition, customer experience, and changes in internal focus, such as sales forecasts. Customer makes it difficult to raise prices, as repeat customers’ ability to perceive incremental value of a company’s product or service diminishes over time, especially as substitute or competitive products emerge. Increased internal expectations in the form of expected sales increases or new budgets can send prices on a downward spiral. Customer price sensitivity may also serve to keep prices in check, especially in the presence of available competitive substitutes or among a company’s marginal customers.

Even in a deflationary economy, there are opportunities for keeping prices from dropping or even for raising prices. However, customers must perceive that these enhancements deliver a genuine, meaningful benefit, or they will continue to seek lower cost alternatives.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Non-for-Profit organizations encounter a special set of characteristics that influence their marketing activities. Like profit making firms, not-for-profit organizations may market tangible goods and/or intangible services. One important distinction exists between not-for-profit organizations and profit oriented companies. Profit-seeking businesses tend to focus their marketing on just one public—their customers. Not-for-profit organizations, however, must often market to multiple publics, which complicates decision-making regarding the correct markets to target. Many deal with at least two major publics—their clients and their sponsors—and often many other publics, as well. Political candidates, for example, target both voters and campaign contributors. A college targets prospective students as clients of its marketing program, but it also markets to current students, parents of students, alumni, faculty, staff, local businesses, and local government agencies.

A second distinguishing characteristic of not-for-profit marketing is that a customer or service user may wield less control over the organization’s destiny than would be true for customers of a profit-seeking firm. A government employee may be far more concerned with the opinion of a member of the legislature’s appropriations committee than with that of a service user. Not-for-profit organizations also often possess some degree of monopoly power in a given geographic area.

Perhaps the most commonly noted feature of the non-profit-organization is its lack of a bottom line—business jargon referring to the overall profitability measure of performance. Profit-seeking firms measure profitability in terms of sales and revenues. While not-for-profit organizations may attempt to maximize their return from specific services, they usually substitute less exact goals, such as service-level standards, for overall evaluation criteria. As a result, it is often difficult to set marketing objectives that are aligned specifically with overall organizational goals.

A typical aspect of a non-for-profit organization is the lack of a clear organizational structure. Not-for-profit organizations often respond to constituencies that they serve, but these usually are less exact than, for example, the stockholders of a profit-oriented corporation. Not-for-profit organizations often have multiple organizational structures.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Once an assessment of the organization’s current human resources situation has been made and the future direction of the organization has been considered, a proposition of future human resource needs can be developed. It will be necessary to perform a year-by-year analysis for every significant job level and type. In effect, the result is a human resource inventory covering specified years into the future. These pro-forma inventories obviously must be comprehensive and therefore complex. Organizations usually require a diverse mix of people. That’s because employees are not perfectly substitutable for one another within an organization.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Increasing prices and reducing the quality of products sold are potential means through which suppliers can exert power over firms competing within an industry. If a firm is unable to recover cost increases through its pricing structure, its profitability is reduced by its suppliers’ actions. A supplier group is powerful when:

It is dominated by a few large companies and is more concentrated than the industry to which it sells;

Satisfactory substitute products are not available to industry firms;

Industry firms are not a significant customer for the supplier group;

Suppliers’ goods are critical to buyers’ marketplace success;

The effectiveness of suppliers’ products has created high switching costs for industry firms, and

Suppliers are a credible threat to integrate forward into the buyers’ industry. Credibility is enhanced when suppliers have substantial resources and provide the industry’s firms with a highly differentiated product.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

A tactic involves Candid Camera-like observations of how your product is actually used by the customer. You may have a wonderful product, created for one thing, but it may end up being used for an entirely different purpose.

Some don’t find real product until they understand with little unexpected help that they are selling the right product to the right customers for the wrong purpose. Their products don’t really take off until customers tell that they misuse it as partial substitute.

You can see creative abuse all the time in the world of fashion: women wearing men’s shirts, and men sporting women’s earrings, sport coats made out of heavily starched wallpaper, evening gowns patterned after lingerie.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

If a firm is making profits from core competences, the question is, why can’t other firms imitate it and build similar competences. This takes us to one property of competences: imitability—the extent to which a competence can be duplicated by competitors. A firm would rather have competences that are difficult to duplicate or substitute. The question is, how? If the knowledge that underpins the competences is tacit in that it is not coded but rather embedded in organizational routines and cumulatively learned over time, potential imitators have three problems. In the first place, it is difficult to know just what it is that one wants to imitate in the second place, even if a firm knew exactly what it is that it wants to imitate, the firm may not know how to go about it since competence is learned cumulatively over the years and embedded in individuals or routine of firms. In the third place, since competences take time to build, imitators may find them themselves always lagging as they spend time imitating while the original owners of the competences move on to higher levels of the competences to newer ones.

If a competitor cannot build competences, the next question is, why not buy them? One answer is that competences may not be tradable or easily moved from one firm to another. Two reasons have been advanced for why. First, because of the tacit nature of the underlying knowledge, it may be difficult to tell just what it is that one wants to trade and who has the property rights for what parts of the underlying knowledge. What is it that we will buy from Honda that allows us to build zippy engines for cars, motorcycles, lawnmovers, and marine vehicles? Who has the rights for what part of the technological knowledge that underlies this competence? Second, the underlying knowledge may be sticky in that it is too costly to transfer. Because of the tacit nature of the data, one may need to observe the seller over long periods in order to learn. This may be too complex and expensive.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.